Upcoming Topics:

Sept 5 
We may finally have a way to predict large earthquakes, but we'll have to build some infrastructure to implement it.

The Precursory Phase of Large Earthquakes

Sept 19
You may have heard about mRNA vaccines from the recent COVID pandemic. Researches have used this same technology to build a vaccine that has the potential to protect against all the flu virus lineages. Could this be a "universal flu vaccine?"

A multivalent nucleoside-modified mRNA vaccine against all known influenza virus subtypes

Oct 3

We cannot obtain energy from the food we eat. That's done for us by mitochondria, organelles in most of our cells, organelles that used to be free-living organisms. But what were they before they started paying us energy rent? The answer could have implications for a variety of neurodegenerative disorders like Parkinson's and Alzheimer's, as well as autoimmune disorders like Sjogren's and lupus. An ancestry-tracing technique called phylogenetics has proven surprisingly unhelpful in this case, but other methods are pointing to an answer.

Multiple approaches of cellular metabolism define the bacterial ancestry of mitochondria

Oct 17
Genome editing methods have the potential to fix disease-causing genetic defects in humans. Prime Editing (PE), an improved form of CRISPR, is poised to rectify the vast majority of such defects. While not yet prime time for use in living people, these researchers show the feasibility of taking stem cells from patients with a disease, fixing the disease-causing gene, and making simplified, miniature organs (organoids)

Prime editing for functional repair in patient-derived disease models

Nov 14
Humans have 23 pairs of chromosomes. With a third copy of all but two of them, we won't survive to adulthood. Yet polyploidy is the norm for hundreds of thousands of species. What evolutionary advantages does it offer, and have we finally cracked "Darwin's abominable mystery"? It's an exciting time to be a paleontologist.

Genetic Contribution of Paleopolyploidy to Adaptive Evolution in Angiosperms

Nov 28
A combined evening with One Book One College, held in the Henderson H building Library, discussing the book:

Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures by Merlin Sheldrake 

We will be in a special room for tonight, H229 in the library. To access this room you have to enter the library on the first floor of the H building then go up the library stairs to the second floor

Dec 12
The evolution of cyanobacteria changed the length of the day and the distance to the Moon. Come learn how

Mid-Proterozoic day length stalled by tidal resonance